Five Links: Get Where You Are Going Edition

Posted on: March 17, 2017March 17, 2017

Deon Ballard

Happy (St Patrick’s) Friday, everyone.

This is a general “stuff” kind of post. From working with the technical debt of legacy systems (and processes) to navigating new regulations for cybersecurity, these links look at the different and daily aspects of maintaining IT infrastructure that supports your organizational strategies. Even the most glamorous of projects are really only glamorous in planning and in hindsight; the work of implementing those projects is (ahem) work.

This is a nice, brief Q&A on how to balance the utility of legacy systems with the need to change an infrastructure or system. The interviewee, Peter Yared, introduces a really nice concept for managing legacy systems: experience. For most of our app modernization work, Red Hat tends to favor an incremental, natural kind of evolution. Sometimes, you rip-and-replace. Yared encourages change, but if a system is so embedded that change isn’t possible, he recommends looking at improving its usability.

This hits on a huge issue facing security and application deployment. Containers make it really easy to consistently and automatically deploy dozens or even thousands of identical images. But there are also huge potential security implications. This post looks specifically at Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat CloudForms, and a feature in CloudForms that can identify any images in the registry that have a known vulnerability and to flag it in OpenShift to block new deployments. It’s a cool feature, but even stepping backward, some kind of process to recognize potential vulnerabilities in images is crucial to a secure CI/CD environment. It’s good toe valuate from a best practices standpoint, too.

This is a potentially very cool development for web and application developers — a new API that can both recognize objects in videos and then make them searchable. This kind of builds conceptually on still image searches. Google’s Machine Learning Engine is also available. Between the two projects, there is a lot for app developers and for innovation around machine learning.

The blog is from September 2016, but the regulations went into effect on March 1, 2017, and this provides a good summary of potential affects. Reading as a layperson, this sounds like the New York State assembly has taken the principles of PCI-DSS and turned them into regulatory requirements, from mandating regular risk and vulnerability assessments to written security policies. Policies like this can have a significant impact on overall IT infrastructures and processes.

This shines a really good light on one of the potential pitfalls of any major technology shift: poor leadership. New anything — applications, systems, processes — is inherently disruptive. A digital transformation plan has to include something beyond installing new software, and that strategy (leadership) is a key component. This has an HT focus, but particularly the first part is very relevant — it’s more than having good technology; it’s about encouraging people to experiment and grow in that technology.